Some of us remember Marie Osmond and her 1973 hit “Paper Roses.” But not all paper roses pretend to be real. The essence of creating is always inspired by nature somewhere at the root. But creating paper flowers with children is not for the purpose of deception. The beauty of the paper flower:
-color sense
-material awareness
-studying nature
-thrifty gifts for mom
-arrangement and spatial awareness
-project follow-through
It’s time to start the school year, or nearly so. Parents everywhere are gearing up for their children’s schooling choices, often at home. Most people who know me or read my blog know that I’m a huge fan of themes in teaching and learning—it adds a framework and keeps a theme of higher order thinking involved from the start. So I encourage a gesture to start the year. Here you see, a door! With a possible theme of animals, even as specific as pigs, the children enter their year of learning; (don’t want to commit to one theme for a year? Choose one theme a month, or week or semester). Pigs is so rich. . .a controversial topic, even. Yet so much a part of childhood lore and story life. What will you use to open the door for keeping a creative mindset for learning this year?
Consider stickers with a family crest to mark the crafting vessels as unique. . .in this case a bottomless bucket of fun was filled with activities each day to help young cousins interact and keep busy. A mustache theme was adopted to keep Father’s Day on the brain and to encourage looking at old family photographs.
“Tea Clubs” or “Tea Groups” have become popular in the middle and high school settings (particularly surrounding the “Mindfulness” movement and trends). A group of students created this wonderful tea bag wrapper kaleidoscope collage. Check it out and try it! Students could even create individual ones. Consider tea bag wrapper trading days for swapping in terms of colors and patterns. This idea is upcycling at its best. Just add Scissors and Glue.
Horse outlines on upcycled card stock. Fill in with torn bits of Washi tape. Gorgeous project.
Lots of excess ribbon fragments around? Cut them into two inch pieces; pin on as a mane for a lion face on round floral circle.
Using this at a church activity? Don’t forget Daniel and the Lions’ Den and also Psalm 34:10
Dr. Thomas Moore has a great song entitled PAPER TOWEL ROLL that encourages children to play with a paper towel roll and use their imaginations. The paper towel roll becomes a many wonderful thing, and hopefully the child gains some amount of imaginative ingenuity in the mental process of singing it.
Similarly, paper towel rolls make fabulous tools for creative projects. 
Theme: Party Hats
Ages: K-2nd grade
Games: wear a party hat necklace; sing the song: Put on your party hat necklace, we’re having a party hat time; put on your party hat necklace, let’s make a party hat rhyme; (name a word, they give rhyming words); teams to put together the most mini paper party hats
Project with Scissors and Glue: decorate a flat party hat; decorate a mini party hat (upcycled plastic inserts from cone shaped objects)
Writing: Write a word to describe party hats
There is no question that our society (and any society that is stratified, and not homogeneous) will yield circles (or orbits as we might hear in millennial culture) of communication, expectations, norms, aesthetics and ideals based on resources, expectations, moral codes and the availability of time and energy. And yet, what appeals to us in the creative realm and what dawns on those who channel creative energy is mostly intuitive.
Education, particularly in the day of choice (and probably in the day of “separate but equal,” and likely even in the heyday of public school prominence), will never be able to surmount these orbiting realms of thought. The best any formal approach can do is hope to keep up, by methods of research and response to any new state of the art development.
How do we “stay ahead of creativity” then? How do we lead it? How do we create the trends and not just follow them? How do we plan for creativity and use it for our betterment?
I believe that the goal of noticing the realms, levels or echelons of creativity going on around us is largely based on resources. Just as eating habits generally have developed from what foods are readily available, so too do creative endeavors that seem rewarding because they line up with the aesthetic and philosophical energy going on around us stem from the resources at our fingertips.
So I would ask teachers (just as I ask businesses I approach for donations of reusable and upcycleable materials), what resources are right there with you that you are not using? How could those resources contribute to the creativity you instill in students and that you model in your lessons?
The mission of Scissors and Glue is to model projects for students (or crafters) with upcycled materials; that is, the emphasis is creativity through resources that might otherwise be thrown away. Consider the number of coffee sleeves tossed out EVERY DAY. Some are corrugated, some are more of a quilted texture. Regardless the texture, they are almost all useful. Save them; find an interesting punch shape and voila. . .adornments for students to use (and not sparingly). Here, a series of pears. The lesson: fruits, songs with pear references, you name it. . make it work for you.
